Jen stopped by last night to pick up a CD while Michelle was making dinner and I was working on laundry. One of the things she mentioned is that the place is still not completely put together, and she speculated that my general ambivalence about living there is the problem.

That is true, in part.

The other part, to be completely honest, is the level of “computer-hobbying” that I’ve been doing at home ever since I moved to Milwaukee. Honestly, it is partly just a coincidence of timing– right about the time I got hired at UWM, I switched my daily use OS on the laptop over to Ubuntu. Linux is so flexible, and so many people are working on writing software and doing tweaks of this or that, it tends to make a geek want to experiment and try new things. Sometimes that means you break something and have to start over. Other times, it spurs you on to think of other things to try or to mess with.

In that sense, then, Windows is GREAT. Windows, as an operating system, is so boring and rigid and unchangeable, there’s really not much reason or influence to entertain yourself tweaking the system and messing around with it. Sure, you can (and I have) dick around with the way it looks, or you can hunt for free software, but eventually the computer is just a tool and there’s not much else to do with it. You turn it off and go do something else.

I have to get myself to do that more often, even though I’ve always got some new project I want to try. If I don’t, not only will my apartment never get completely set up, my thesis will never get completely written.